race against the heart's content
by quorra laraex
Summary: Nothing scared him more than she did. — Sasuke/Sakura, au.


**race against the heart's content**

(_they fall in love, and they don't fall out_)

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She rides her bike every Wednesday at nine a.m., just to pass a local bookstore that she never enters. She sits at her usual spot, just under the shade of a branch of an old oak tree. She'll write in the same book she's been scribbling in for the past twenty-three days, one that she'll keep in the basket of her bike as she rides—which matches her hair—except it's faded unlike the normal saturation that is her locks—and she'll sit for an hour before she'll take off her sunhat and sit outside the bookstore's café. She orders a raspberry iced tea with a lemon wedge that hangs off the rim of her glass.

And then she'll stare at him, eyes like lily pads against his, which are always hard in return. He'll stare back, sip at his coffee—which is black—_like his orbs_, she notes—until she has the decency to break their gaze, stand up, and ride away.

She doesn't even know his name.

But she knows that the boy has hair like the night, jet black, but when it's hit at a certain degree of light—it's blue, almost. He's unnaturally pale, with a sharp jaw and a deep voice that she's only had the pleasure of overhearing once.

He's beautiful, she thinks.

/

Sasuke Uchiha is a quiet one. Judgmental and calm, his heart runs cold. He normally doesn't care of the people who work and order a usual latte at his family's rundown coffee shop, but this girl is particularly odd to him. Pink hair? He snorted the first time he's laid his eyes on her. She's got huge eyes, green and reeking of innocence that bore holes into his head as he feels the gulp of steam fall through his throat.

He mentally checks off every day she visits—each and every time she'll sit at the table across the entire patio from him, only to stare at him with those summer lime eyes. And as much as he hates himself for even sparing a second thinking of an unusual stranger, he begins to wait for her presence. This becomes a daily routine that he confidently does not make obvious. Out of all the customers who come and go during the days, especially since it's the midst of summer, she's the only one his mind feels is worth the attention. And it irritates him as to why.

That hadn't been his initial thought. The first time their eyes had met had only been a mere, yet strange, exchange when she had scurried past him all that time ago in the beginning of June after paying for her iced tea. He—unfazed, her—dazzled.

Now when he flickers his eyes to those familiar greens always perched at a distance, a table diagonal from him, he'll glare, knowing she'll never have the courage to speak to him. Her eyes say it all—gullible, naïve, childish. They were the eyes that didn't know pain, that wouldn't understand the suffering he had to go through and why he was there every morning in the first place.

Or so he thought.

/

Sometime before July, the boy does not appear in the usual corner of the patio.

There's something that swirls in her stomach, something that burns and knots and plays her emotions. Sakura asks herself why a stranger's one absence can affect her so much. She needs to remember to never get emotionally attached.

She does not come back to the café until the third.

/

There is pink in the corner of his eyes, and he does not dare turn his focus onto her. His eyes stay placed on his coffee, thick and dark, and becoming cold. He has yet to touch it. Elbows rested on the table, vision unwavering and ignorance in contact.

Perhaps, the sight of her innocent, open-minded self annoyed him.

Or perhaps he had only wanted her innocent, open-minded self to approach him this time.

She doesn't.

/

It is July fourth, and both the bookstore and coffee shop are closed.

The outside is crowded, however, because it is nine in the evening and there are children on high shoulders, young teenagers locking lips on picnic blankets, and the laughing of a joyous bundle as fireworks are set off above the lake. He tries not to scowl.

It would have been easy to find him, if she had been looking for him at all.

Truthfully—and she means in _all_ honesty—she hadn't been searching for this mystery stranger that she'd been ogling the past month or so. She had only come down to that area because Naruto had practically forced her to come, even when she typically didn't enjoy the aroma of sweat and barbecue accompanied with the incessant screams of little children. While Kiba and the rest of them followed the obnoxious blonde down to the lake, Sakura was able to ditch the gang, her excuse of going to the bathroom.

And she really _did_ have to go, but immediately and abundantly forgot when her head pivoted to the left, only to see him on the patio, standing beside the wooden railing.

He's alone, pale lips kissing an end of a cigarette. He inhales the fumes and exhales the scent of nicotine, and Sakura thinks she likes this air more than down there. The boy doesn't bother looking her direction when she finds her way next to him, arms hanging off the side and her shoulders slouched.

"Smoking kills, you know," she lazily drawls, staring as a group of seven or eight set up more fireworks.

He scowls. What did she know about what kills?

"My parents both died of lung cancer," she mutters a little too nonchalantly for his comfort. She laughs a bit, nervous and weak before she continues. "You'd think she'd stop after my dad. Silly."

"Hn."

He flicks the cig to the floor, crushing it with the heel of his foot, before staring up at the explosion of reds and golds and whites, juxtaposing against the night. He's about to mention something about her going back to her friends, but when the time he actually bothers to turn his head to face her, she's already gone.

/

"Haruno," a familiar voice echoes outside of the mug he's drinking from. "Sakura Haruno."

It _would_ be a flower. He places the glass cup on the table and meets her cheerful gaze with a dead expression. Perhaps she had been more courageous than he thought of her. "Pardon?"

There is not even a slight ache of friendly in his voice. It's dark, cold, and cruel. Not that she minds. "I never gave you my name."

He does something she can't exactly comprehend between a grimace and a growl before he murmurs in response. "Uchiha, Sasuke."

"Can I sit with you?" she invites herself.

When he doesn't answer, she takes a seat.

/

After her daily dose of that damned book she continues to pour her words into, he can find her sitting in front of him, sunhat on her sunset hair, elbows resting on the table, chin resting on her hands. There's a natural shade between coral and crimson that's tinted on her cheeks and he isn't sure if it's a blush or if it's the heat painting her normal sun-kissed skin.

She asks him why he's so quiet, and he asks her why her hair is pink.

"Great comeback," she laughs, and he can't tell if she's being sarcastic at first. "You probably had that in your mind for awhile now, huh. Touché."

He smirks and it lasts approximately two seconds, but Sakura does not miss the curving of his lips and he does not miss the glint in her eyes.

/

"Haruno."

She doesn't miss a beat to reply while she scrawls and scribbles with an olive pastel on a sketchpad. "Yes?"

"That book you always write in," he points to the caramel leather journal at the corner of their clothed table. She takes it everywhere. "Why is it so important?" So he's curious. Sakura tries to hide her smile by taking a sip of her usual cold, raspberry tea.

"My dad gave it to me when I was young."

There's a silence that transcends from understanding to even more curiosity.

"This is your last summer before attending college up north, correct?" She nods when she knows he isn't even looking at her. "Why are you here?"

This has probably been the most he's ever said to her. And she's surprised he's actually paid attention to the times she'd ramble on and on about her goals and accomplishments and a word would never escape his lips. If she were lucky, he'd nod. Most times he didn't.

She blinks a couple of times before his question registers.

"I like you," she shrugs. "You're different."

/

The first time they kiss, they don't stop.

He reads her body like Braille and she tingles at his touch.

And when she awakes under the oak, he is not beside her.

The morning after marks the center of August and Sakura finds nothing but a pack of unfinished Marlboro cigarettes on the table beside a very finished cup of black coffee.

/

Sasuke Uchiha has been gone for a week and is nowhere to be seen. Sakura worries, panics, frets, and is unsure of what to do. So she does what she can.

The blossom-headed girl constantly visits in the morning, ordering her usual and soaking up more sun. She is surprised when the regular clerk, a tall, gray-haired man with a scarred eye strikes up a conversation after finding her staring at the corner of the patio.

"He still talks about you, you know," he says behind her.

"Where is he?"

"He left," the two syllables escape past Kakashi's mouth so easily that she almost wants to kill him.

"Why hide from me?" She looks at him now, full-on, eyes hard.

He sighs and crosses his arms when he responds. "It's not _just_ you, per say. It's everything you come to bring him."

"I—," the Haruno girl hesitates, tries piecing things she hadn't known were even there together. "I don't understand."

"His parents are dead, and his brother abandoned this shack." The clerk stokes back to the register, waving a hand as a gesture to her before he finishes and her muddled mind slowly starts to clear. "Everyone always ends up leaving around here."

/

Sakura Haruno wishes she could be as blunt as Ino—who isn't afraid to embrace the truth and squeeze at it lifeless in her own hand, just to acknowledge it, because it _is_ fact and she _is_ straightforward—and she, very easily, very strongly, knows how to move forward without a petty look back. She wishes she could be like Naruto—ready for anything that life decides to hit him with and ready to retaliate life back by using the obstacles to become stronger, _better_. She can ask for advice all she wants, but she'll never know how to follow it.

She's not that kind of girl. Hopelessly lost in faith, she was, as she sits on the patio at the brink of ten a.m. She's the type to wait and pray and hope that maybe some day he'll come back. She drinks black coffee, despite the fact she absolutely _hates_ it—because it gives her a pathetic sense of relief and just the slightest bit of hope that maybe out there, he's thinking of her when she's thinking of him. Maybe, just maybe, he's trying a raspberry iced tea with a lemon wedge hanging loosely off the rim. He'll probably cough and grunt something about how it's sweet—_too_ sweet—for him to finish what has been started.

(_Just like her_.)

/

There is an evening sometime in the beginning of September in the week before she has to leave for school when she tries her first cigarette. It was his and it tastes awful on her tongue—disgusting enough for her to accidentally allow it to slip through her thin fingers as she coughs grossly into her arm. It is colder than usual, the sun barely evident, the café closed. Has been, for awhile now. Anyone could've seen it, how the only owner left his family business. There was only limited time left before it'd go out of business. And now it has. But he isn't that selfish. He'd probably been investing in a bigger business to live up to his family's name. She isn't sure why she's still there. She isn't very sure of anything anymore.

"What a waste," a voice seeps into the atmosphere behind her. She turns at the dark thrill of it, heart thumping—only to be disappointed when her eyes stare into ruby pools.

"I've got more, Kakashi," she turns back to the landscape of the sky meeting the horizon she's become so used to admiring and throws him the Uchiha's old pack.

"Wasn't talking about the cigs," he laughs a sad kind of laugh as he points at her, indicating his initial point.

"It's not a waste to have hope."

"True," he breathes in the slow night air. "But it _is_ a waste to have hope in someone who has no hope."

She knows he's right. Kakashi is always right.

"Disappointed when you saw _me_, eh?"

"Slightly."

"My apologies," and then there's silence. "Nothing scared him more than you did."

Sakura shrugs. "He's never coming back, is he?"

Kakashi avoids looking into her eyes when he answers. Sasuke had warned him about how dangerously naïve they were. "No, he's not."

She doesn't try to ask if he'll take her to see him—_just once, _she'll beg—because her attempts are useless and he always kept his word.

"Then can you do me a favor?" The teen doesn't wait for a reply when she pulls a worn-out leather booklet from the basket of her bicycle. "Give this to him."

This is the last time she sees sadness and the final time her feet trudge their way off the wooden floor that is the Uchiha's Café patio.

/

Dark irises skim the familiar book on his desk.

He doesn't want to open it, doesn't want to read what the damned girl poured out from her heart and enveloped her thoughts into an unintelligible cursive. But he does, anyway, because he never was good at following what he didn't want to do and she was long gone anyway.

His fingers trace over the edges of each page as he flips through the thick parchment. Word by word, fragment by fragment, it was only a simple journal. A diary, if one wanted to get technical with the terms. Dates in every right hand corner, looped cursive sprawled on every blank parts of paper. He reads everything, and inhales, stupidly thinking that maybe the scent of raspberries clung to the inside of this goddamn book.

He smirks because this caramel leathered and tattered book is completely Sakura—with its kissed-by-the-sun and tattered outside to the run-on sentences describing the nonstop pinnacle of her thoughts. Some parts make him want to chuckle, because he reads everything in her voice and it amuses him when she mentions how she's getting dreadfully tired of ordering this tea but refuses to try something new because if_ he_ could drink the same cup of bitter coffee every morning, _she_ could do the same. Apparently he had been her inspiration all along. Silly girl.

He reads and reads and reads until he's over three quarters of it because that's where she's stopped and he realizes he isn't fond of something so beautiful to come to an end.

He stares at the last page that is scrawled with her messy script, observing the date to the decorative scribbles of her penmanship on the rim in order to ink out the pen. On August fifteen, all that covers the page is of him. There are no irrelevant comments or examples of family story-telling. She does not talk about the tea or the weather or coffee or cigarettes. Her last page consists of words, words that will stick with him forever—especially the last six mustered at the very bottom.

_I know he loves me, too_.

He breaks his own heart before she can.

/

Four fresh, long years later, Sakura Haruno graduates with a medical degree.

She feels bad when she finds her first, seriously injured patient happens to be the very Kakashi Hatake, and laughs.

/

It is January when she sees that a surname of Uchiha has checked into the hospital. He has a broken arm and his ribs are severed. There's internal bleeding that she's trained for. When he's put under anesthetics, she remembers her place as a doctor and properly and carefully progresses with the procedure.

_At least it isn't lung cancer_, she thinks when she begins.

After her performance, and Sasuke awakes, Sakura has an assistant and nurse inform him that he's alright and the operation went well.

/

And not long afterward, she receives a phone call from a voice she thought was almost foreign to her ears. She shakes when her voice is said on the line. Dark and husky; she forgets how to breathe.

/

It's tempting.

Tempting to let go of the wooden handle of her chair (that she's gripping so, _so_ tight) while her teeth are preoccupied with gritting down on her tongue (because she knows if she doesn't bite hard, she'll probably explode)—and just ram the palm of her hand against his pale face.

But she doesn't. She holds back—_literally_.

"You look different."

It isn't a compliment. It's just a mere inspection that he says to break the silence. And she does look different, with her pink hair only up to her shoulders and her skin un-tanned. She looks older, matured. Her eyes are the same, however. The Uchiha finds comfort in that.

"How are you?" He asks.

"I'm well," and it's awkward and she rambles because that's what Sakura's good at. "I read about the Uchiha Corporation. Congrats. You and your brother have definitely found it—_success_, I mean. You always wanted that, I remember."

He nods. "You performed surgery on me."

"I did," she states with her eyes downcast. She remembers reading the scripted cause and she tries not to shudder in front of him. "Why did you do it?"

His hands are folded on the polished wooden table and it takes him a long while until he can finally look back at her. "I was missing happiness."

He rummages to the inside of his jacket, grabbing with two fingers a tiny little book that contained the secrets long forgotten. Sliding it across the table, he watches as her pupils dilate.

Perhaps the only thing about her that scared him was the unfamiliar sense of hope he hadn't felt since he was a child.

/

"Why did you keep it?"

"The same reason why you waited for me."

/

He kisses her with no intention of leaving this time. Because he finally has it—even when he hadn't recognized it at the tingle of his fingertips the first time. He is happy.

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**a/n:** hi omg so i started this at the end of my spring break at around 2 a.m. and i never got around to proof read or edit it. at least i came around to post it. the ending is shit i am sorry my apologies forgive me

i run out of inspiration fairly quickly

thoughts?


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